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Monday, March 18, 2013

Something Old, Something New, Something Borrowed, and Something Blue

The availability of quality instructional technology resources and devices is growing exponentially. Who can possibly keep up? While the bells and whistles of so many new resources may seem appealing, we should take care to evaluate their usefulness in the curriculum before jumping on the band wagon and abandoning tried and true resources that have been available for some time. That said, here are four resources for your consideration this week.

Something Old

ReadWritethink.org has been around for a long time. The site contains a wealth of information and activities for teachers and students including lesson plans and student interactives that are categorized by grade level, type, learning objectives and more. In the past, though the interactives were all great tools, the lack of ability to save work in progress was a downfall which ReadWriteThink is now addressing. There are currently 15 interactives with the ability for student work to be saved. The following video explains how to do this:

Some of my favorite interactives from the site are:Cube Creator which can be used to create a biography cube, mystery cube, story cube or other student created cube.Compare and Contrast Map that can be used in any subject area across all grade levels from 3-12.Letter Generator which students can use to learn to write friendly and business letters.Trading Card Creator for science and social studiesPuzzle Me Words that reinforces letter sounds for K-1 students.

Something New

The Swivl is a great new device to help you create videos with an iPhone, iPod or iPad mini and without a cameraman. Enhance your lessons with videos of your own demonstrations or record just about any lesson you might want students to watch in your flipped classroom. The video and audio are recorded wirelessly.

Something Blue

When you want to quickly share a file without having to log into a cloud account such as Dropbox or Google, Pastelink is about as easy as it gets. All you do is go to http://pastelink.me/, drag and drop a file to the center of the page then copy the short URL that is created instantly. The copied link can then be pasted anywhere for others to access within 7 days.
The site is free, has no advertisements and there is nothing to install. You can share files up to 250 mb without logging in, but if you want to share images, videos, or other larger files up to 2 Gb, you will need to create an account. It’s still free.